A girl adds a balloon outside the home of Gina DeJesus, one of the three women found alive after being held captive for as many as 10 years in a Cleveland home. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

David FinkelhorSpecial To The Washington Post

The news, at the same time shocking and hopeful, about the discovery of three Cleveland women who went missing as teenagers a decade ago has riveted the country. Surely the disappearance of a child is one of the most primal calamities that evolution has equipped us to dread. But the cases that rise to the level of news tend to distort perceptions of how often children go missing and why. It’s important to sort out the myth and reality about missing kids.
1. Most missing children have been abducted by strangers.
Stranger abductions, such as the case of the three young women in Cleveland, are fearsome because they appear random and so often involve rape or homicide. But children taken by strangers or slight acquaintances represent only one-hundredth of 1 percent of all missing children. The last comprehensive study estimated that the number was 115 in a year.

Far more common are children who have run away, have gotten lost or injured, have been taken by a family member (usually in a custody dispute) or simply aren’t where they’re expected to be because of a miscommunication. The only scenario more unusual than stereotypical kidnapping is when families falsely report a child as missing to disguise murderous deeds. Read more…

U.S. military guards walk within Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, in this file photo. President Barack Obama’s stated desire to try anew to close the Guantanamo Bay prison remains a tough sell in Congress. (AP File Photo/Brennan Linsley)

By Karen GreenbergSpecial to The Washington Post

Renewing his push to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Obama this past week said what many of his critics have been saying for years — that it is “inefficient,” inspires new terrorists, alienates our allies and, above all, “is contrary to who we are.”

Coming in response to the detainee hunger strikers, whose numbers increase every day, Obama’s comments suggest that the inmates are close to accomplishing what others opposed to the prison have not: They’re making it necessary that their cases get resolved. Let’s revisit some myths about the prison.

1. The Guantanamo Bay prison is open for business.
Guantanamo Bay is in limbo. It’s neither closed nor fully open. The prison hasn’t accepted any new detainees since authorities brought Muhammad Rahim al Afghani there in March 2008 — several months after President George W. Bush announced his desire to close the camp. No one has been added since Obama took office. Instead, in recent months, non-U.S. citizens accused of international terrorism and apprehended abroad have been brought into federal custody; 12 are held in Manhattan and Brooklyn, awaiting trial or recently convicted. Read more…

An Indian rag picker speaks on a mobile phone at a slum in Allahabad last month. India, Asia’s third-largest economy after China and Japan, has been reporting nearly double-digit growth in GDP for much of the last decade, but there are concerns it has not benefited most Indians. The World Bank says that 42 percent of Indians — 455 million people — live on less than $1.25 a day. (Sanjay Kanojia, AFP via Getty Images)

By Daniel AltmanForeign Policy

Is India different? Last month, India’s finance minister confidently declared that nothing could stop his country from becoming the world’s third-biggest economy. He may well be right, but size alone does not make India a special case. Its growth has been fast, but it is no trailblazer.

Here are five popular myths about India’s growth, all of which are easily debunked:
1. India has outperformed other emerging economies in the recent past.
In the two decades from 1992 to 2012, average living standards in India did rise faster than those in most countries that started from a similar level. In fact, only nine other countries in the world saw living standards, measured by purchasing power, climb more quickly: Albania, Armenia, Bhutan, China, Equatorial Guinea, the Maldives, Mozambique, Sudan and Vietnam. Faster growth was to be expected in countries that started out with lower living standards than India’s, but several of these — Albania, Armenia, Bhutan, China, and the Maldives — actually started out with higher purchasing power. Relative to them, India underperformed.
2. India will grow faster than other emerging economies in the future.
For the next five years, the International Monetary Fund projects that living standards in several countries will grow faster than India’s. Among them, again, are countries with a higher starting position: Bhutan, China, the Republic of Congo and Georgia. India will likely outperform many other economies that have similar living standards today, but it hasn’t unlocked every secret of economic growth just yet.
When India finally opens its markets to trade, exports will supercharge its growth. Read more…

In the current global financial crisis, austerity has become a term of abuse — one that connotes unnecessary pain and suffering on the part of already-hurting citizens. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What austerity actually means is “measures to reduce a budget deficit,” or responsible fiscal policy. And that’s hardly the only misconception that has clouded our economic thinking of late.

Although you’d never know it, the so-called global financial crisis is really a public debt crisis — and the countries that have reigned in their spending are now growing briskly while the profligate founder. Here are five other myths about austerity that have muddied the waters.
1. Growth requires fiscal stimulus.

Demonstrators hold placards and candles in memory of Savita Halappanavar in support of legislative change on abortion during a march from the Garden of Remembrance to the Dail (Irish Parliament) in Dublin, Ireland, in November 2012. Savita Halappanavar’s family claim she might have survived if she had been given an abortion. (Peter Muhlypeter Muhly, AFP/Getty Images)

Rickie SolingerSpecial to The Washington Post

When debating whether a fetus’ “right to life” trumps a woman’s “right to choose” — or whether the news media has paid enough attention to the trial of a Philadelphia doctor who allegedly killed seven babies born alive during late-term abortions, as well as a pregnant woman — Americans are bitterly divided on abortion. Before abandoning facts for rhetoric, let’s tackle some misunderstandings about this procedure.
1. Laws against abortion have always been based on concern about unborn life.

Abortion was generally legal in the United States until the mid-19th century. At that time, physicians eager to professionalize obstetrics pressed state legislatures to outlaw midwifery and abortion while granting doctors sole authority over pregnancy and childbearing. State anti-abortion statutes were primarily justified on the grounds that women needed to be saved from uneducated folk practitioners, infections, future infertility and other physical risks.

In the courtroom, prosecutors rarely discussed the unborn, instead accusing abortion providers of preventing women from fulfilling their destiny: motherhood. When early feminists such as Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion, they argued that the disconnect between sexual intercourse and maternity endangered women’s chastity — at the time considered their main basis for moral standing and personal dignity.

Then, in the second half of the 20th century, technology such as sonogram imaging and genetic testing allowed us to see a fetus not simply as a potential life but as a patient requiring diagnosis and treatment, and sometimes entitled to more medical intervention than a pregnant woman. Read more…

“I paid my income tax today!” So went one of Irving Berlin’s lesser-known patriotic jingles. “I never felt so proud before/To be right there with the millions more/Who paid their income tax today!” Few share Berlin’s enthusiasm, as grumbling about the income tax reaches a crescendo on April 15. Let’s topple some tall tales about taxes before writing checks to — or getting checks from — the dreaded Internal Revenue Service.

1. The income tax is a big-government Democratic scheme.

The first income tax in the United States was enacted under the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Before the Civil War, Republicans were the party of big government, supporting high tariffs, infrastructure spending and centralized bank regulations.

Once the war began, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase feared that mounting deficits would spur inflation. Banks, which were funding the war, demanded action to ensure U.S. solvency, and tariffs, the country’s main source of revenue, had reached a peak. “Chase has no money, and he tells me he can raise no more,” Lincoln complained in 1862. Read more…

President Barack Obama and Congress have until March 27 to reach a budget agreement to avert a government shutdown. If they don’t meet the deadline, federal agencies will halt many public services and send “non-excepted” workers home without pay. Let’s look at some of the misconceptions about what happens when the U.S. government officially closes shop.

1. It won’t happen this time.

The country has weathered several federal shutdowns over the years, and it could happen again. The last threatened shutdown was in 2011; it was narrowly avoided late on Friday, April 8, within an hour of the midnight deadline.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history, which also happens to be the most recent, occurred during Bill Clinton’s presidency and lasted 21 days, from Dec. 15, 1995, until Jan. 6, 1996. It came only a month after a five-day shutdown from Nov. 13 to 19, 1995. From fiscal year 1981 through 1995, during the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton presidencies, there were nine shutdowns, none lasting longer than three full days. Six shutdowns occurred during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, between fiscal year 1977 and fiscal year 1980, ranging from eight to 17 full days. Read more…

Our political system was not designed to be efficient, but it wasn’t supposed to be self-destructive, either. After a near-default on the public debt and a fiscal cliff that threatened a new recession, we are facing another man-made crisis: the sequester, across-the-board cuts in discretionary domestic and defense spending that are set to begin Friday and extend over a decade. Let’s separate fact from fiction about the sequester and its impact.

1. Blame Obama — the sequester was his White House’s idea.

Identifying the origins of the sequester has become a major Washington fight. Bob Woodward weighed in recently with a Washington Post op-ed making the case that the idea began in the White House. He’s right in a narrow sense, mainly because he focuses on the middle of the 2011 negotiations between Obama and Republican lawmakers. If you look before and after, a different picture emerges.

In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts. After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. If the supercommittee didn’t broker a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade — the sequester — would go into effect. The sequester was designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it. Read more…

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that creating manufacturing jobs is the nation’s “first priority.” To some, this may sound like a throwback to a long-lost era; after all, such jobs are being eliminated, outsourced or automated, right? Not really. The United States remains a world leader in manufacturing, and that sector remains essential to our economic and technological future. Here are the five biggest misconceptions about U.S. manufacturing — and why the sector still matters.

1. A manufacturing job is no longer a ticket to the middle class.

There is no doubt that America’s manufacturing base has declined, peaking at 19.6 million jobs in 1979 and now at just over 11 million jobs. Despite this economic transition, however, U.S. manufacturing jobs are still worth having. On average, full-time manufacturing work pays 20 percent more than full-time service-sector jobs. In my recent travels across the country, I met electronic technicians with only a high school diploma who had risen through the ranks of manufacturing companies to earn more than $100,000 a year. High school grads in retail or service-sector jobs rarely reach six figures.

Of course, manufacturing alone cannot solve our unemployment problem. For the foreseeable future, the lion’s share of America’s job growth will be in the service sector. By 2014, employment in services is expected to reach 129 million jobs, with education and health care growing most quickly. Still, there are lucrative careers available in manufacturing. And Obama’s State of the Union proposal to create manufacturing hubs across the country — “to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs” — will generate opportunities for young Americans with an aptitude for making things.
2. We can outsource manufacturing as long as product design stays here.Read more…

Timothy F. Geithner was often misunderstood as U.S. Treasury secretary. (Joshua Roberts, Bloomberg)

By Noam ScheiberThe Washington Post

Four years ago, it looked like Timothy Geithner might not survive his confirmation hearings, much less complete a term as Treasury secretary. A background check revealed that he hadn’t paid payroll taxes for over two years while working at the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile, his chief qualification for the Treasury job was his tour as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he executed President George W. Bush’s bank bailout.

Geithner left office last month as one of the most important Treasury secretaries in history, having helped rescue the economy from collapse. (He is joining the Council on Foreign Relations as a distinguished fellow.) Clearly there were a few things we misunderstood about him. Here are five of the biggest:

1. Geithner is a creature of Wall Street.

When even the wife of Rahm Emanuel believes you’re a Goldman Sachs alumnus, it’s going to be tough to convince the country otherwise. But the truth is that before taking over as Treasury secretary in 2009, Geithner spent 20 years in public service, save for a few months at the Council on Foreign Relations. Read more…

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 150 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address, day and evening phone numbers, and may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.

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